


Artistic License

by Not_You



Category: Watchmen (Comic), Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Bestiality, Characters Reading Fanfiction, Characters Writing Fanfiction, Crack, First Kiss, Furry, How Do I Tag, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Porn Magazines, Ridiculous, Short Chapters, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Writers, Xenophilia, dan is a loser, dan writes porn, deigetic fanfiction?, mama always told me not to dig in a pervy ornithologist's discarded writing, old fic, so is rorschach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 10:30:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3893029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_You/pseuds/Not_You
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone prompted for Dan writing porn that's a thinly veiled version of himself and Rorschach and Rorschach finding it.  And then someone made a joke about owl porn, I think.  However it came up, I ran with it like the eighteen-legged freak I am.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_"So what's your name, stranger?" She was exactly the kind of woman he hated. Painted, and not even painted well, coarse, greasy red around her mouth like blood._

_"My friends call me Red. Which lets you out." He pressed the barrel of his gun to the soft skin under her jaw, and cocked it._

_"Well. Should've known it wouldn't work. I'd heard about you."_

_"What have you heard?" He murmured, his hoarse voice dropping to the soft and almost hypnotic register that meant he was truly angry._

_"Last I heard, you didn't even like humans."_

_"Are you what counts for human these days, whore? I'll take Strix any night."_

Walter still doesn't know who Strix is. He's been frantically thumbing through these crumpled sheets, more and more alarmed as it becomes clearer and clearer that he and Red are essentially the same person. He hadn't meant to see these, and he's flushed with shame and misery that he's still reading, but he can't help it. The protagonist is 5'4", hopefully in a conscious bid to make it different from Rorschach's 5'9". Hopefully. The nickname isn't ironic, his hair is the same red as Walter's, although he'd never call his 'fiery', and to Daniel's credit as a writer, he doesn't do it too often. 

Red is a hard-boiled detective who doesn't smoke, indulging the requisite oral fixation with hard candies instead of cigarettes, makes bad puns, and hates nothing in the world so much as seeing children hurt. Skimming further, he can see that Red is a patriot, and if the views are a bit of a caricature of Rorschach's, it's plainly done with affection. He still can't find Strix, and that's what worries him, because as near as he can tell, Strix is Red's lover as well as his partner, and he's apparently not even human in addition to being male. It doesn't help that none of this is even in order. The typewritten lines crumpled in the trash had caught his eye, and he bitterly regrets following up on his curiosity. He groans, and flattens another one out on his kitchen table.

_"Strix..." Red murmured, running his fingers through his partner's pinfeathers. "Thought they had you that time."_

_"Ha." He wrapped one vast brown and grey wing around Red, pulling him close. "I'm more worried about you." He preened that bright hair, soothed to have Red back where he belonged, safe in their nest. "I know how this kind of thing gets to you."_

_Red tickled Strix behind the ear tufts and bestowed one of his rare smiles on him. "It turned out better than I thought it would." ___

__There's an angry red pen notation under this, in Daniel's blocky engineer's scrawl: _FUCKING HELL, WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE?__ _


	2. Chapter 2

Panic doesn't set in until long after Dan remembers that he gave up on those missing pages. First he has to work on the story a bit and then get stuck and start pondering his way out. And then he has to start to wonder if one discarded scene could be salvaged. All of this takes some time, and it's only when Dan starts digging through the trash and comes up empty handed that his stomach drops and he starts to sweat, heart galloping in his chest. 

There's an advantage to living alone, and that's knowing things will stay where you left them. Unless your snooping, psychotic partner digs through your office trash. Then you're fucked. Even as he freaks out over Rorschach passing judgment on what he's found, Dan is furious. Really, he can just suck it. If you can't handle demented owl porn, don't dig through a pervy ornithologist's discarded writing. You fucking deserve what you get. This is completely true, but it's pervy owl porn, so being completely humiliated is pretty unavoidable. Fuck. 

Hell, it had started out as a joke. A weird porno rag from a going-out-of-business sex shop that ran the most bizarre erotica he had ever heard of. Their ethos seemed to be to purvey everything you couldn't find anywhere else. And in the back, there had been a solicitation for bestiality fiction, and Dan had been moved by a perverse impulse. In the middle of bored housewives with peanut butter on their cunts and men pretending to be mares in heat, Strix and Red had made their debut. And because he had finally found the weirdest magazine in the world, they had _loved_ it. They've been talking to him about a fucking book series, for Christ's sake. He's been thinking of taking them up on it.

Now he buries his face in his hands and groans, slumped in his chair. He probably doesn't even have to look for Rorschach. He'll come back and kill him himself. Dammit, he had thought he was safe! Rorschach didn't even like normal pornography, let alone porn full of soft feathers and chirping and quivering cloacae. There will be no explaining himself. That he's not really _that_ gay for owls, that these are sort of his own fantasies but that he'd never actually pursue Rorschach, and all that other stuff no one would ever believe. 

He groans, sitting in his office chair with his head in his hands and wondering, as he does every fucking day of his life, just how he got into this mess.


	3. Chapter 3

Walter showers and showers, but the wrong won't wash off. It's not that the stuff exists. Honestly, he's just relieved that his partner's perversions can be pretty categorically labeled harmless. In the back of his mind Rorschach growls that there are no harmless perversions, but he knows what Walter means. Daniel would never hurt a child, or force anyone, or do any of that stuff that actually hurts people. Certainly, he's guilty of many of the lesser ones, those little things that don't explode society so much as erode it, but if you can't handle a little erosion, get off the planet. No, the thing that Walter is trying so very hard to wash away is the knowledge of his own response to this... _pornography._ Homosexual pornography. With owls. He's going to need more soap.

_Strix's talons were dangerous when he was on his back, so Red made a habit of binding them up in leather gauntlets. It was an awkward position for a bird, and his wings went into occasional little spasms of fluttering, trying stupidly to right him._

_"Red..." His voice was breathless, instinctive panic warring with lust._

_"Hush." Familiar fingers preening through his feathers calmed him, and the fluttering stopped as he began to let out the little chirping noises that were so unlike the deep tones of his usual calls. Red's brutal, knowledgeable hands put disarrayed feathers back in order, and then went over them again and again. Soon he was gently pulling, and Strix was shifting between chirping and whimpering in his eerie, too-human voice. He sometimes felt like a disappointment to his mate. Feathered, without the beautiful sensitivity of naked skin, endowed with alien equipment. Red's fingers combed through the down on his belly, then lower. He slid one into Strix, and he cried out in human tones, talons flexing uselessly inside the gauntlets._

Walter thinks of Daniel bound beneath him, and scrubs harder.


	4. Chapter 4

They don't see each other for days, and Dan walks around in a haze of dread. Nite Owl patrols with unwonted ferocity, forgetting everything in his unending battle and only going home to sleep. 'The Case of The Whispering Candles' is sitting uselessly in the typewriter, Strix and Red the last people he wants to spend time with right now. He doesn't even want to spend time with himself and when he sees his partner he almost runs. But Rorschach is persistent and faster in a sprint, so he just stays where he is. Better to die with some measure of dignity. He watches his partner walk toward him across the rooftop and wonders if this wouldn't be happening if he had never made him that grapnel gun.

"Nite Owl..."

"Look, I know it's creepy, but you should have more respect for my privacy!" He's suddenly reminded of his mother, who defended herself by attacking. There's something brittle in his voice, and Rorschach hears it too.

"Am not... gave in to curiosity. Regrettable. Have pages with me." He starts digging in his inner pockets. Dan stares.

"Rorschach?"

"Unspeakable. Perverted." He presses the pages into Dan's numb hands. "Written by a good man."

He mechanically opens them and finds margin notes in Rorschach's chicken scratch, wandering lines of blue ink. They seem to be about word choice, mostly, revealing anew his partner's strange poetic bent. "You... _critiqued_ them?"

He coughs, shuffling his feet. "Felt I should make some reparation for invasion of privacy."

"There were in the trash, man."

"Not irreparable. See?" He points to a paragraph of Strix watching a suspect that Dan has rewritten ten times. "Shift second to last sentence to the beginning, and cut here." His black-gloved finger hovers just above the page, and Dan suddenly laughs.

"You stole, read, and then made helpful suggestions as to how I might best improve my _hard-boiled detective zoophilia fetish porn?!" _Rorschach stares at him for a long moment, and then reluctantly nods. Dan is howling now, wobbling and finally sitting down on the rooftop to laugh until the tears run down his face. "Oh my fucking _god!"_ he wheezes. "Rorschach, you're killing me! You're goddamn killing me!"__

__Rorschach stares down at him, then snorts quietly before joining in, his laugh as rusty, joyous, and surprising as it always is. By the time they've both recovered, they're sitting back to back, the pages beside them. "Noticed certain resemblances." Rorschach says in the quiet._ _

__"Well, of course you did, buddy. Haven't I always said you're a character?"_ _

__"Hurm." Rorschach crunches a sugar cube._ _

__"Are you mad?"_ _

__"No. Find sexual content... alarming, however."_ _

__"It was solicited, if that makes you feel any better."_ _

__"Why isn't Strix female, Daniel?"_ _

__He has never actually thought about that, and that realization alone is a massive clue. "Holy shit, I don't know."_ _

__"Hurm." Another crunch. "Propose an experiment."_ _

__It's quite possibly the lamest kiss Dan has ever experienced, but there's always time to teach technique, and he pulls his partner into his arms to get started._ _


End file.
